Can someone explain what is exactly happening here? Help with distance nodes!
I'm working on an leaf texture and I've gotten a lot of help by following this article and the respective .SBS graph:
My leaf texture is looking great, but in the interest of actually knowing what's going on, what the hell is going on here? I'm at a part where I'm creating the leaf veins using a tile sampler node, edge detect nodes, histogram scans, and lots of distance nodes. This part confused me, so I just decided to lift this section from his graph. The graph looks like this:
The tile sampler is creating disc patterns with random color values, but then that gets converted into a histogram scan to crush the mid-tones into white which feeds into a distance node. That finally gets converted into an edge detect which leaves me with the leaf veins.
I read the description of the distance node and the expanded explanation on the Substance documentation page, but am still confused. How exactly is the distance node interpreting this data...
...into an abstract web of details? The gradients are also not even branching off of these disc shapes that are being made in the tile generator, but instead are being generated around those discs instead. I don't get it.
Thanks for the help!
Replies
He uses pretty standard technique to scatter seeds (white dots) to then make blobs from those seeds through distance . Once you have the blobs you can turn their intersections into a sort of network. That may looks like leaves veins.
I suggest to use normal and curvature nodes after those blobs instead of edge detect .
A key thing is to scatter those seeds properly . I would add a bit of random deviation from that stepped gradient lines. They look very artificial IMO in your link .
Also IMO doing procedural leaves is a pure sport unrelated to any production value. Procedural textures are useful where you couldn't just easily take a photo . Like tiling tinings or big macro things etc. The whole substance designer is around scattering those blobs and some things are never looks good from just blobs.